Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank.

Yellin, Michael

Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank. Ed. Kathleen Pfeiffer. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2010. 208 pp. $45.00.

Jean Toomer. Cane: A Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Rudolph P. Byrd. New York: Norton, 2011. 472 pp. $13.95.

Jean Toomer, author of Cane (1923), and Waldo Frank, author of Our America (1919) and Holiday (1923), were intimate friends who greatly influenced each other's writing. Toomer's letters to Frank were edited by Mark Whalan and published in 2006, but prior to the release of Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, edited by Kathleen Pfeiffer, their complete correspondence had not been published. Through assiduous archival research, Pfeiffer presents the full arc of Toomer and Frank's homosocial bond and eventual estrangement. Juxtaposing Brother Mine and Cane enriches our understanding of the complex language in Toomer's modernist masterpiece. Pfeiffer's book also chronicles a salient episode in relations between African Americans and Jewish Americans: the trip that Toomer and Frank took to Spartanburg, South Carolina, where Frank, a Jew, passed as an African American. Furthermore, readers interested in modernist letters will find Pfeiffer's text a worthy companion to the recently published correspondence between Georgia O'Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz. The descriptions and insights that Toomer and Frank poured into their letters rival the best writing in their published works.

Recent criticism on Cane has tried to displace Frank's influence on Toomer in favor of the latter's involvement with African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Pfeiffer's expertise on Waldo Frank's life and work enables her to re-establish the important role he played in shaping Cane. Her informative introduction and biographical notes provide a framework for reading the letters, and by using references to events and dated letters in undated letters, she has painstakingly reconstructed the chronology of Toomer and Frank's correspondence. Most importantly, Brother Mine refocuses scholars' attention on Toomer's and Frank's writing from the "Cane Years," 1919-1924. Too much scholarship privileges their revisionist accounts of their friendship, which were distorted by the political, religious, and philosophical preoccupations of their later years.

The primary critical intervention that Pfeiffer offers is that, contrary to Toomer's later claims, his estrangement from Frank was not due to his disappointment over his friend's foreword to Cane. Pfeiffer writes,

    Frank's foreword to Cane, Toomer charged in later
autobiographical
   writings, wounded him deeply, because Frank presented Toomer
primarily as
   a black writer instead of emphasizing the multiethnic identity he
   preferred. Their letters, however, provide no evidence whatsoever
that
   Toomer felt betrayed by Frank's foreword; instead, they actually
vitiate
   that claim, not only by showing Toomer's enthusiastic gratitude
for
   Frank's essay, but also in demonstrating Toomer's
willingness to be
   identified as Negro well after he read Frank's foreword. (3) 

Pfeiffer also counters the attendant claim that Frank fetishized Toomer's blackness. She argues, "To be sure, Waldo Frank's well-known tendency toward arrogant pomposity reveals itself in his comments on race here, yet his attempts to assure Toomer of his sympathetic racial politics are poignant in their bumbling earnestness" (9). Pfeiffer cites the real cause of their breakup as having been Toomer's "astonishing betrayal of Waldo Frank," the affair he had with Frank's wife, Margaret Naumberg (18). Frank is figured as the victim in Pfeiffer's retelling of this story.

There is much in these letters to substantiate the general contours of Pfeiffer's argument. It is true that Toomer expresses his approval of Frank's foreword throughout their correspondence, and that he conveys a tremendous sense of gratitude toward Frank. Frank is indeed earnest regarding his racial identification with Toomer. However, I think Pfeiffer goes too far in characterizing Toomer and Frank's relationship as a solid bond that is shattered by Toomer's affair with Naumberg. As in Cane itself, these letters also contain a subtext signaling Toomer's ambivalent identification with both African Americans (something that Frank never quite grasps), and with Frank himself.

Early in their correspondence, Toomer tells Frank that his trip to Sparta, Georgia "is more or less responsible for most of my stuff that you like" (38). In Georgia, Toomer encountered impoverished rural blacks and their folk culture for the first time. As the scion of a wealthy (albeit declining) African American family from Washington, Toomer found these rural "folk" to be quite foreign, and he was deeply ambivalent about being identified as African American. He was also terrified by the constant threat of racial violence in the Jim Crow South. These feelings are powerfully conveyed in stories from Cane such as "Blood Burning Moon" and "Kabnis." Responding to Frank's positive comments on his writing, Toomer is implicitly tying his representation of Southern African Americans to his trip to Sparta rather than to his own racial identity. The unconscious tension between Toomer's slippery self-identification and Frank's celebration of the "Negro" aspects of his protege's writing was established well before Toomer's criticism of Frank's foreword to Cane.

Later, when Toomer and Frank were planning their trip to the South, Toomer writes,

    One phase of the trip which I have thus far said nothing about, I
think
   best to mention now. At whatever town we stay, I'll have to be
known as
   Negro. First, because only by experiencing white pressure can the
venture
   bear its fullest fruit for me. Second, because the color of my skin
(it
   is nearly black from the sun) at the present time makes such a course
a
   physical necessity. (60) 

Here, Toomer characteristically identifies with black suffering, but also distances himself from it, noting that he is only "known as Negro" because of the temporary coloring of his skin. In response, Frank enthusiastically identifies with African Americans and Toomer: "Wherever we go, South, of course we go together. If you go as Negro, cant [sic] I also? What is Negro?" (61). Frank adds, "I have always felt that the only truly Christian people in America are the Negroes. Perhaps, since Christianity is a deep outgrowth of Jewish Thought, and I a Jew, this is why I feel as I do toward them" (61). Toomer never responds directly to Frank's notion of identification between African Americans and Jewish Americans. In fact, despite using the figure of a Jewish cantor in his story "Fern" and telling the editors of The Liberator that he was part Jewish, no references to Jews appear in Toomer's letters to Frank. Such evasion reflects his identification and disidentification. Toomer was drawn to Southern blacks and to Jews like Frank because he saw that their suffering might be recast as the collective strength of a burgeoning rebellion, yet he was also deeply uncomfortable about placing himself on the margins with disenfranchised sufferers.

Toomer's ambivalent identification with Frank, present from the start, complicates Pfeiffer's narrative regarding Toomer's affair with Frank's wife and the abrupt end of their friendship. She notes that Toomer exchanged "his intimate friendship with Frank for sexual intimacy with Frank's wife" (17) and that once this sexual intimacy began, "Toomer's attitude toward Frank altered considerably" (18). It is not clear, however, if the affair was the cause of Toomer's break from Frank, or a symptom of it. Toomer's decision to cuckold his mentor makes more sense if framed as a subaltern breaking the shackles of patronage. Consider the language Toomer uses in a letter written after he had begun his affair with Naumberg:

    But the problems that beset you cannot be met and solved in these
   disassociated terms. In fact, your book of collected papers, Lucien,
   etc., can be nothing more than evasions. And since I have brought a
real
   sense of these things to you, since I have not touched the essential
   elements of your travail, I too in my contacts with you have served
as
   evasion. If you ask why I have not plunged in, my answer is: you have
   been so worn and fatigued and agitant that I dared not to. (152) 

Toomer goes on to say that Frank is "at the end of a weakening and heart-rending curve, while I am comparatively strong and fresh" (153). Pfeiffer is right that Toomer's tone has changed here, but I think this change is rooted in the ambivalence Toomer always felt toward Frank. More important, these lines represent a remarkable moment in the history of the Harlem Renaissance: a moment when a black writer challenged the position of his white patron.

Although her conclusions may be misleading, Pfeiffer's excellent work in compiling Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank's correspondence should not be overlooked. The value of these letters lies not in the documentation of Toomer and Frank's relationship but rather in the rich lyricism that animates their deep affection as well as their ambivalence and evasions. Brother Mine is essential reading for anyone interested in Toomer, relations between blacks and Jews, and modernism.

The arrival of revised Norton Critical Edition of Jean Toomer's Cane should be a cause for celebration among scholars of African American literature and American modernism. Toomer's collection of stories, poems, and a drama, originally published in 1923, combines the high-modernist aesthetics of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Waldo Frank's City Block with unflinching depictions of the collisions between white and black Americans. Sadly, despite the inclusion of well-chosen critical articles and a generous helping of Toomer's letters, this new edition disappoints because its distinguished editors, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Rudolph P. Byrd, have chosen to cast a spotlight on Toomer's racial identity rather than on the liberatory possibilities of his literary achievement.

Gates and Byrd privilege Toomer's identity over his text in the primary critical intervention of their introductory essay. After noting that Toomer's "mother, father, grandfather, and grandmother all self-identified as Negroes," they analyze Toomer's inconsistent self-identification on draft registrations, census rolls, and a marriage certificate. They then declare that "[i]t is our carefully considered judgment, based upon an analysis of archival evidence previously overlooked by other scholars, that Jean Toomer--for all his pioneering theorizing about what today we might call a multicultural or mixed-raced ancestry--was a Negro who decided to pass for white." Though Gates and Byrd present this conclusion as the result of new scholarship, it is merely a restatement of a hackneyed assumption about Toomer: that he betrayed his race and, as a result, never wrote anything worthy of study after the completion of Cane. Gates states this position clearly in a recent interview in the New York Times: "He was running away from a cultural identity that he had inherited.... He never, ever wrote anything remotely approaching the originality and the genius of Cane. I believe it's because he spent so much time running away from his identity.... I feel sorry for him." Gates's tale is a monumental oversimplification. Toomer failed to produce a second literary masterpiece for many reasons, among them his falling under the sway of G. I. Gurdjieff, a dominating and destructive Svengali. Moreover, if we closely compare Cane to Toomer's later writing, we see that the difference in quality is due not to a disavowal of his African American heritage but rather to his abandonment of trenchant depictions of American lives for abstract philosophizing.

I am not suggesting that Toomer's biography is completely irrelevant to the study of Cane. Focusing on the difference between his racial self-definition and his "actual" racial heritage, however, is misguided. As an individual, Toomer may not have been completely honest with his friends and critics, but we remember him for his genius as a writer--for his representation of the collision of races in America in a modernist frame. At the tail end of their essay, Gates and Byrd briefly mention Alice Walker's suggestion that we keep Cane but let Toomer go, but by this point in the text the damage has been done.

Part of the problem is that Gates and Byrd depend too heavily on Toomer's autobiographical writing, published in The Wayward and the Seeking, completed after he wrote Cane. They might instead have dug more deeply into the letters and journals produced during the period of Cane's gestation. (In particular, I wish they had included one of the many "letters to the editor" that Toomer wrote during this period, instead of his "Why I Entered the Gurdjieff Work.") These contemporary sources display Toomer's struggle to transform the identity of the "tragic mulatto" into an empowering and affirmative subjectivity.

A related problem is Gates and Byrd's focus on fragmentation in Toomer's best-known text. As in many high modernist works, fragmentation is an important formal technique in Cane, but ultimately the defining trope is fusion--especially the fusion of races. Gates and Byrd undervalue this emphasis on racial fusion and the way in which the text's heteroglossia produces new hybrid identities. Most notably, Gates and Byrd's approach to Cane does not account for the hybrid black/Jewish identity of the title character of "Fern," or the comparison Toomer draws between this character and a Jewish cantor. Gates and Byrd also fail to mention that Waldo Frank, Toomer's close friend and mentor, was himself Jewish and that Frank's Jewish-modernist notion of exhuming the voices of "buried peoples" informs much of Cane. Rather than investigating the new set of hybrid identities that Toomer represented and explored, Gates and Byrd fixate on his disintegrating relationship to his "cultural inheritance."

The editors of this well-researched and well-pubricized new edition of Toomer's Harlem Renaissance classic had a unique opportunity to set the agenda for a new generation of Toomer scholars who might fully unpack the discursive complexities of Cane. Failing to take it, they have instead reverted to calcified racial politics that do not do justice to a modernist masterpiece.

Reviewed by Michael Yellin, Daniel Webster College